Indian Strategic Studies: 12/29/25

29 December 2025

Back in Play: U.S.-India Nuclear Partnership Finds a New Opening

Gaurav Sansanwal

India’s new nuclear energy law is New Delhi’s most significant step to unlock the promise of nuclear power and finally fulfill the promise of U.S.-India civil nuclear cooperation. The Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India (SHANTI) Act opens India’s tightly controlled nuclear power market to private players, while reforming India’s liability regime to bring it closer to global norms—as part of a broader national strategy to attract greater investment from key trade partners, and install 100 gigawatts (GW) of nuclear energy by 2047.

Given that prices for renewables plus storage continue to beat new nuclear in most cases, this may not be the nuclear “renaissance” India hopes for. Still, the reform creates some tangible openings for U.S. firms. With supplier liability removed, U.S. companies can now compete in India’s market for reactors, fuel services, and R&D partnerships for advanced technologies like small modular reactors—without the liability exposure that previously made India's market untenable.

The Golden Fleet’s Battleship Will Never Sail

Mark F. Cancian

On December 22, President Trump announced a new class of “battleships” that will be 100 times more powerful than previous battleships and larger than any other surface combatant on the oceans. The ship’s purported characteristics are so extraordinary that the announcement will surely spark immense discussion. However, there is little need for said discussion because this ship will never sail. It will take years to design, cost $9 billion each to build, and contravene the Navy’s new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower. A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water.

Design: The ship’s design will take many years. At the “30,000 to 40,000” tons cited by the president, the ship is much larger than anything the United States has built in the last 80 years, other than aircraft carriers. The truncated DDG-1000 class (only three built) displaced 15,000 tons but still took 11 years from program initiation (2005) to commissioning of the first ship (2016). The battleship will be more than twice as large and more complicated—nuclear-capable with directed-energy weapons. The first ship, USS Defiant (BBG-1), is likely to commission in the early- to mid-2030s, assuming it is built at all.

Ghost Busters: Options for Breaking Russia’s Shadow Fleet

Benjamin Jensen and Jose M. Macias III

Victory in Ukraine will prove elusive without finding ways to counter Russia’s use of illicit maritime trade to sustain its war economy. That is, Ukraine and its Western backers need to resurrect the idea of commerce raiding and broad-based economic war to bust the ghost fleet and impose costs on Putin’s war machine. In the twenty-first century, states can conduct commerce raiding without ever firing a shot, effectively using open-source intelligence to support diplomacy, lawfare, and sanctions designed to attack a rival state’s economy. By finding ways to aggregate open-source data, the United States can support broader international efforts to restrict Russian illicit maritime trade.

Since sanctions limited oil exports in late 2022, Russia has purchased an illicit fleet estimated to range from 155 tankers and 435 total vessels, when support ships are included, to as high as 591 ships. This shadow fleet—or ghost fleet, as it is colloquially known—transports an estimated 3.7 million barrels per day, representing 65 percent of Russia’s seaborne oil trade, and generates an estimated $87 to $100 billion in revenue per year. To put that in perspective, revenue from this illicit trade network has matched, if not exceeded, the total value of economic and military assistance provided to Ukraine since the start of the war.

The White House Transformed Asia in 2025: Expect Much More in 2026

Joshua Kurlantzick

In the days following the January 2025 inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump, many Asian governments believed Trump’s second term would bring benefits for the region.

The White House promised a tough line against China, which had been menacing other states in regional waters and also pledged to combat Beijing’s supposedly illegal trade actions. Washington had already started discussing tariffs and a more transactional trade approach, but most Asian governments were accustomed to dealing with such transactionalism. In the first Trump administration, Asian leaders like former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe were among the most effective in dealing with the U.S. president, and many politicians in the region felt ready to handle a second Trump presidency.

What Is the Extent of Sudan’s Humanitarian Crisis?

Mariel Ferragamo and Diana Roy

Sudan has been engulfed in civil war since fighting erupted on April 15, 2023, between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The violence shattered a short-lived peace that formed on the heels of recent coups and two civil wars, worsening an already precarious humanitarian situation.

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As the war rages on, Sudan is enduring the world’s largest and fastest-growing internal displacement crisis, with several rights groups and the United States describing the violence—particularly in Darfur—as genocide. Most recently, the RSF’s capture of El Fasher, the last major government-held city in Darfur, marked an end to an eighteen-month siege but raised the risk of a de facto partition of the country.

Operation Southern Spear: The U.S. Military Campaign Targeting Venezuela

Diana Roy

Since early September 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump has authorized more than twenty lethal strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea. The strikes are part of an escalating pressure campaign against Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, whom U.S. officials accuse of being the leader of a drug cartel that the State Department designated a foreign terrorist organization in November. In recent weeks, Washington significantly increased its air and naval presence in the region as part of Operation Southern Spear, a U.S. military campaign that it says targets drug trafficking in the Caribbean.

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The Trump administration has framed the operation as necessary to curb the flow of drugs from Latin America to the United States, but some experts say the campaign’s scope and intensity go beyond counternarcotics objectives, possibly reflecting a broader effort to force regime change in Venezuela. Meanwhile, heightened U.S. pressure on Venezuela—including a naval blockade on all sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving the country, which followed expanded sanctions against several Venezuelan oil shipping companies—has raised concerns about escalation toward war and broader regional instability.

What is Operation South

Conflicts to Watch in 2026

Paul B. Stares

The logic of this exercise is straightforward: U.S. policymakers often find themselves blindsided by conflict-related crises that divert attention and resources away from other priorities and even lead to major military interventions that cost American lives. Those involved frequently lament afterward that officials should have done more to avert or prepare for these crises. Thus, the purpose of the Preventive Priorities Survey (PPS) is not just to alert busy U.S. policymakers to incipient sources of instability over the next twelve months but also to help them decide which are most pressing.

The need for U.S. policymakers to look ahead and actively lessen conflict-related risks grows every year. The world has undeniably become more violent and disorderly. Indeed, the number of armed conflicts is now at its highest since the end of World War II. An increasing proportion of those, moreover, are interstate conflicts, reversing a post–Cold War trend. The United States is uniquely exposed to the growing risk of armed conflict, as no other power has as many allies and security commitments.

Ten Most Significant World Events in 2025

James M. Lindsay

Anyone hoping that 2025 would provide a break from what was an exhausting 2024 on the world stage came away disappointed. The past twelve months have been a trying time for international cooperation, as the forces of conflict and contention grew stronger and the end of the American led world order more clearly came into view. Unlike 2024, when the pageantry of the Summer Olympics and beauty of the host city Paris reminded everyone of what cooperation and collaboration can accomplish, 2025 provided few instances of inspiration. One can only hope that 2026 will surprise us in a good way. But before we jump to the new year, here are my top ten most significant world events in 2025. You may want to read what follows closely. Many of these stories will continue to make news in 2026. 

Three Shocks that Shook the World in 2025

YANIS VAROUFAKIS

A new, harder, colder world order was erected on the grave of European ambition in 2025. The year’s enduring lesson is that in an age of existential contests, strategic dependency is the prelude to irrelevance.

ATHENS – This was the year that the remaining pillars of the late-20th-century order were shattered, exposing the hollow core of what passed for a global system. Three blows sufficed.

Gen Z Is Making Politics Hopeful Again

NGAIRE WOODS

OXFORD – Grim as the final month of 2025 has been – with headlines dominated by mass shootings, crises, and polarization – one positive development offers a glimmer of hope for the coming year. Across the developing world, younger people are demanding jobs, affordable food and fuel, economic opportunity, and action to slow climate change. From South Asia to Latin America, they are presenting political leaders with a stark choice: listen and respond, or step aside and be replaced.

Nepal is a prime example. In September, the government banned 26 major social-media platforms that had been used to expose the lavish lifestyles of politicians’ children, triggering protests over corruption, nepotism, and the lack of opportunities for young people. The 73-year-old prime minister, K.P. Sharma Oli, then inflamed tensions further by mocking the thousands of teenagers who took to the streets. When security forces fired on crowds, killing at least 19 people and injuring hundreds more, demonstrators set fire to parliament and ransacked Oli’s private residence. He resigned the following day.

Gaza’s New Normal

Daniel Byman

Gaza has reached a new equilibrium. Unsurprisingly, it is an ugly one. The good news is that the intense fighting is over and humanitarian relief is steadily entering the strip. Since the cease-fire began on October 10, Israel has released almost 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, and Hamas has returned all living hostages as well as most of the bodies of those killed, in keeping with the Trump administration’s 20-point peace plan. Israel has reopened the Kerem Shalom, Kissufim, and Zikim border crossings and promised to allow 600 trucks per day into Gaza, carrying both aid and commercial goods for sale, which it has begun. The Israel Defense Forces has also withdrawn to a “yellow line” that limits its presence to around 53 percent of the strip, although several of the specific boundaries are disputed.

Plans for a more extensive resolution, however, are stalled, and the relations between Hamas and Israel today are characterized by limited but persistent conflict, not progress toward peace. Israel’s policies, Hamas’s refusal to lose more power, and the Trump administration’s poor attention span are likely to foil the peace proposal’s more ambitious plans for Gaza’s rehabilitation. Fundamentally, further progress depends on the creation of an International Stabilization Force to police Gaza, disarm Hamas, and eventually train a new, vetted, non-Hamas Palestinian police force that would assume control over Gaza. The IDF would then withdraw to 40 percent of the strip and eventually to 15 percent, as local security conditions improved. At the same time, a technocratic and apolitical Palestinian government would emerge to govern Gaza, reporting to what U.S. President Donald Trump has called a “Board of Peace,” which would be officially headed by Trump and run on a day-to-day basis by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank, is supposed to undertake major reforms while preparing to eventually take on a major role in governing the strip.

The Depopulation Panic

Jennifer D. Sciubba

In 1980, the economist Julian Simon took to the pages of Social Science Quarterly to place a bet against his intellectual rival, the biologist Paul Ehrlich. The Population Bomb, Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, had argued that the staggering growth of the human species threatened to jeopardize life on Earth. Simon insisted that, contrary to Ehrlich’s predictions, humanity would not self-destruct by overusing the planet’s resources. Instead, Simon believed that humans would innovate their way out of scarcity. Human ingenuity, Simon wrote, was “the ultimate resource.”

Their wager was specifically about the changes in the prices of a suite of commodities over a ten-year period, but it represented much more. The infamous bet was a battle between two larger camps: the catastrophists, who thought that humans were breeding themselves into extinction, and the cornucopians, who believed markets and new technologies would work together to lower prices no matter how big the population became. Ehrlich ultimately lost that bet at a time when global economic conditions favored Simon’s optimistic view of the functioning of markets. Countries also avoided catastrophe as the soaring growth of the world’s population in the twentieth century did not lead to mass famine but to growing prosperity and rising standards of living.

How America and Iran Can Break the Nuclear Deadlock

M. Javad Zarif and Amir Parsa Garmsiri

The Islamic Republic of Iran serves as a perfect illustration. Over the last two decades, Israel and the United States have tried to persuade the world to stop treating Iran as a normal country and to instead treat it like the international system’s leading danger. The result has been constant denunciations, crushing sanctions, threats of military action, and, most recently, military operations against its territory—carried out during diplomatic negotiations between Tehran and Washington. Iran, in response, has been forced to devote more resources and attention to defense. It also increased uranium enrichment in defiance, to show that it would not be pressured into submission. The external securitization of Iran has fed into a parallel dynamic at home, as the state adopted a stricter approach in dealing with domestic social challenges, responding to these challenges with tighter restrictions.

The result is a securitization cycle: a vicious spiral in which Iran and its adversaries feel compelled to adopt more hostile policies in response to each other’s behavior. This phenomenon is somewhat like the security dilemma, in which one government’s decision to bolster its capabilities prompts others to do the same. But with the security dilemma, each side is reacting to material increases in the other’s capacity. This cycle begins with rhetoric. The target country is portrayed as a threat, and then is treated as a threat. And in response, it turns to activities—such as bolstering its missile capabilities or increasing enrichment—that can be used to corroborate the initial allegation. The cycle, in other words, produces a self-fulfilling prophecy. The securitized country gradually distances itself from independent agency and becomes trapped in a series of reactive behaviors.

Are Japan and South Korea Poised for a Historic Breakthrough?

Ayumi Teraoka

When the leaders of China, Japan, and South Korea last met, in May 2024, observers viewed the meeting with a sense of relief. Japan and South Korea were emerging from one of the darkest periods in their bilateral relationship, when tensions over Japan’s colonial legacy in Korea had become so intense that they derailed traditional areas of cooperation in security and trade. In 2018, leaders in Tokyo reported that a South Korean warship had locked its radar on a Japanese patrol plane, and in 2019 the two countries launched a tit-for-tat escalation, in which Tokyo tightened export controls and Seoul responded.

The Pentagon’s AI Problem Isn’t Algorithms, It’s Evaluation

Benjamin Jensen and Yasir Atalan

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the new arms race and the centerpiece of defense modernization efforts across multiple countries, including the United States. Yet, despite the surge in AI investments, both Silicon Valley and the Pentagon struggle to answer one simple question: How can decisionmakers know if AI actually works in the real world?

The standard approach to answer this question is an evaluation practice called benchmarking. Benchmarking is defined as “a particular combination of a dataset or sets of datasets . . . and a metric, conceptualized as representing one or more specific tasks or sets of abilities, picked up by a community of researchers as a shared framework for the comparison of method.” This practice allows the researchers to evaluate and compare AI model performance, for example, how well a large language model (LLM) answers questions about military planning. Yet, proper benchmarking studies are few and far between for national security.

DoD's AI Balancing Act

Sebastian Elbaum and Jonathan Panter

Exaggerations and unsubstantiated claims pervade debates about the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) across the government, economy, and society. The hype cuts both ways, with both proponents and opponents of AI adoption making claims that require more evidence and analysis to adjudicate. This battle is particularly salient in the realm of national security, in which the stakes of technological adoption can be life-and-death.

Advances in AI over the last decade—fueled by breakthroughs in deep learning, computing power, and the emergence of Generative AI (GenAI)—promise to transform national security decision-making and the exercise of military power. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) recognized this potential early, moving to embrace AI as a critical enabler for future warfare. This early recognition was evident in the Department’s 2014 Third Offset Strategy, and in its launch of the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) in 2015.

Corporate AI Is a Threat to Freedom

RICHARD K. SHERWIN

If AI remains under the control of profit-maximizing firms, liberal democracy could become an illusion. The public urgently needs to understand that freedom depends on defending human agency from incursions by machines designed to shape thinking and feeling in ways that favor corporate, rather than human, flourishing.

NEW YORK – Eight years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that whoever masters AI “will be the ruler of the world.” Since then, investments in the technology have skyrocketed, with US tech giants (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta) spending more than $320 billion in 2025 alone.

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